4Yet it must be admitted that our friends can sometimes judge us a bit harshly; Montesquieu comments in Pensées (no. 308) that we are at times criticized or ridiculed by our own friends, and then the word takes on a more ironic meaning: “I used to say of tyrannical and presumptuous friends: ‘Love has compensations that friendship has not’” (“Je disais sur les amis tyranniques et avantageux : ‘L’amour a des dédommagements que l’amitié n’a pas’”, Pensées, no. 1067). But to such disabused observations it can be useful to oppose the remark of Rica, who finds in friendship “that good engagement of the heart which makes the sweetness of life here” (“ce doux engagement du cœur, qui fait ici la douceur de la vie”, LP, 32 [34]). A friendship can be crossed by disagreements without suffering from them, as Usbek indicates when he says of the peaceable Troglodytes: “They worked with common solicitude for the common interest; their only disputes were those to which a good and tender friendship gives rise” (“Ils travaillaient avec une sollicitude commune pour l’intérêt commun ; ils n’avaient de différends que ceux qu’une douce et tendre amitié faisait naître”, LP, 12). When his First Eunuch declares contrariwise that he has “really never known that engagement that is called friendship” (“guère jamais connu cet engagement qu’on appelle amitié”, LP, Supplementary Letter 1 [15]), it reveals thereby the depravation into which the inhuman violence of which he has been victim has plunged him.

5Thinking no doubt of Cicero’s De amicitia, Montesquieu devotes several paragraphs in his Pensées to the social meaning of friendship. The Romans in particular knew the bonds of friendship that cemented the social system, a virtue eroded since by modern despotism: “Citizens depended on citizens through all sorts of bonds: they were linked with their friends, their freedmen, their slaves, their children. Today, all this has been abolished, even paternal authority: every man is isolated. It seems that the natural effect of arbitrary authority is to privatize all interests” (“Les citoyens tenaient aux citoyens par toutes sortes de chaînes : on était lié avec ses amis, ses affranchis, ses esclaves, ses enfants. Aujourd’hui, tout est aboli jusqu’à la puissance paternelle : chaque homme est isolé. Il semble que l’effet naturel de la puissance arbitraire soit de particulariser tous les intérêts.”, Pensées, no. 1253).

6The word interests, which is not necessarily pejorative to Montesquieu, is so here, insofar as it denotes a truly narrow view, “base interest, which is really nothing but the animal instinct of all men” (“intérêt bas, qui n’est proprement que l’instinct animal de tous les hommes”) – which is reminiscent of the mean Troglodytes (LP, 11).

7The principal points are that (1) friendship always represents a choice, a preference given to certain persons because one cannot attach oneself to all, and (2) like all durable social relations, it is founded on a mutual advantage: “We strike a sort of contract for our common utility, which is just a reduction of the contract we have struck with society as a whole, and even seems, in a certain way, to be prejudicial to it.” (“Nous passons une espèce de contrat pour notre utilité commune, qui n’est qu’un retranchement de celui que nous avons passé avec la société entière, et semble même, en un certain sens, lui être préjudiciable”, Pensées, no. 1253). He thus recognizes a certain inherent tension between the friendship contract and the social contract.